Freelance Perl Developer for occasional contract work

Telecommute · United Kingdom

Description

Are you proficient in Perl? Are you looking to work with friendly colleagues, on projects that make a difference, and fresh technology challenges? If so, this opportunity with mySociety's 15-person development team might interest you.

We’re looking to build a pool of freelance web developers that we can call upon for short-term contract work as we build and deploy Software as a Service products based on our charitable tools. At the moment the need is in our Community team, working with clients in local government to provide them with street and environment reporting services via FixMyStreet Pro.

You will be comfortable with client liaison, listening to their needs and helping to translate those into tickets and features. Your work will help us sustain our charitable work via commercial activity, and increase our reach in the UK.

No recruiters or agencies, please.

What does the role involve?

As a web developer working with our Community team you will help us to:

Roll out the FixMyStreet Pro product to new clients, integrating it with their existing systems and workflows

Further develop and extend our FixMyStreet Pro services

What we’re looking for from you

We’d like to see some or all of the following:

At least two years of proficient programming experience in Perl in a professional environment

Experience in working with databases (such as PostgreSQL or MySQL)

The ability to write clean, maintainable HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Experience with version control, preferably Git and GitHub

A pragmatic approach to automated testing

Experience of collaborating with others on web development projects; it would be a bonus if that was client-facing work

And we’d love to hear from you if you are:

Keen and able to learn

Friendly and motivated

A thoughtful and clear communicator

Able to identify a client’s requirements and work with them to implement

Able to work in a responsible and self-directed manner, within a broader team

We continue to run our sites in the UK, and help groups in over 40 other countries to establish and make a success of their own, similar sites.

Our charitable work is made possible by major grants from funders such as Luminate, the Hewlett Foundation, and others, who support our desire to share software, knowledge and good practice for the benefit of the global civic technology community. We work across three thematic areas, developing online services in Transparency, Democracy and Community.

Our growing research team aims to establish how, whether and when civic technology can make a difference, and share these learnings widely with civil society and governments. Our project management style aims to minimise pain and distraction, and leave people to get on with doing great work, normally in small teams.

Our commercial subsidiary mySociety Ltd delivers off-the-shelf services for local authority and other clients in the UK and abroad, along with commercial access to our data services and custom development work and consultancy. Its profits are reinvested into the work of the charity.

mySociety is a flexible employer. We welcome people who are committed to making a difference, but we take work life balance very seriously and we celebrate the idea of quality, not quantity of working hours. Most of our staff work remotely whilst still seeing each other face to face as often as we can. We work from home, co-working spaces, or small offices. And as a mySociety developer you can see the benefits and talk to the users, every day.

Application details, deadlines and dates

Please supply a current CV and a covering statement (500 words maximum) showing us why your skills make you a good fit. Include your day rate and availability between now and the end of March.

We’ll keep this advert open until we’ve found a suitable person or people. We’ll be reviewing responses weekly, and will aim to let you know as quickly as possible whether or not we’d like to talk to you more about some contract work.

We have a preference for applicants based in the UK or a compatible timezone. And again, no recruiters or agencies, please.